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Roger Federer ready to fill the void left by Rafael Nadal's absence

Simon Briggs

The master of finesse: Roger Federer in action this week at the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati. Photo: Getty Images

How do you judge greatness? The question is always there, hovering in the background, when we talk about the yin-and-yang struggle between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

Nadal's followers claim that, despite a deficit of 14 grand slam titles to Federer's 17, their man's dominance in head-to-head meetings marks him out as the superior player.

Yet this week we have seen another side to the argument, and it concerns longevity. While Nadal has just withdrawn from the forthcoming US Open with wrist trouble - the second time in his career that he has been unable to defend a grand slam because of injury - Federer has been defying his 33 years with a series of superb results.

Can you imagine Nadal, who is only 28, still contending for major titles at that sort of age? Hardly. It is a rarity for him just to make it through a year without some catastrophic breakdown. The last time he played all four majors in a season was in 2011. Compare that to Federer, who will notch up his 60th consecutive slam when he walks out on Arthur Ashe Stadium next week. To put it another way, the great man has not missed one of these biggies since 1999, when he was 18 years old and lost to compatriot Ivo Heuberger (no, me neither) in qualifying for the US Open.

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Remember those iconic Gillette ads of the late 2000s? Today, as Tiger Woods rests his dicky back, and Thierry Henry warms a pundit's sofa, Federer is still churning out the wins. He has 49 already this season, the highest figure on the tour, many of them against opponents who were learning to read when he won his first Wimbledon. He is surely sport's greatest survivor.

How, then, does Federer manage it? If tennis can be broken down into four elements - physical, technical, tactical and mental - then each piece of the puzzle plays a part. But the starting point must be his God-given gifts, which are hard to fully appreciate unless you are sitting beside the court.

"When I watch tennis, the sound tells me a lot," says Craig O'Shannessy, lead analyst for the ATP Tour and author of the Brain Game Tennis blog. "In Roger's case, the guy floats around so lightly, almost as if he's skipping rope, that you can hardly hear him. He has very elastic ankles and great strength in his calves so that the lower leg does most of the work. He's not carrying a huge amount of muscle - just the right amount to get the job done."

Tennis is an incremental game. Every movement is repeated ad infinitum, and Federer's elegant style - with its deft footwork and impeccable stroke mechanics - saves him a fraction of energy on every stroke. Those savings mount up over the years, which is why he is still going strong while contemporaries like Andy Roddick, Marat Safin, David Nalbandian and Lleyton Hewitt have either retired or are held together by steel rods.

"One of the keys to injury prevention is a smooth style," says Sergio Gomez-Cuesta, a biomechanical specialist at the Gosling International High Performance Centre in Hertfordshire. "Nadal is a magnificent athlete, but he wouldn't even be in the world's top 50 for smoothness. His backhand happens in a violent rush, with an incredibly fast swing. I don't know the details of his wrist injury but I do know that the body stiffens up as you get older, and distal injuries [which occur at the outer end of bones] become more common in the wrists and elbows.

"If Nadal is all about force and power, then Federer has incredible finesse. He scores 10 out of 10 for smoothness, like Pete Sampras did, or John McEnroe - a guy who often looked as if he was hardly doing anything on the court, because he would feed off his opponent's pace. McEnroe is still playing at an amazingly high level today, aged 55, but you can't see Nadal having much of a senior career."

In tennis's greatest rivalry, opposite poles collide - which may help to explain its magnetism. Nadal uses his muscularity and endurance to wear down opponents from the baseline. The longer a rally lasts, the more likely he is to win it.

Federer's chief assets, by contrast, are his nimbleness and sudden speed. In fact, O'Shannessy believes he could have won even more titles if he had concentrated more ruthlessly on those key strengths.

"Over the past two or three years, everyone has been asking the same question: why doesn't he come forward more?" O'Shannessy says. "He was getting stuck at the back of the court and allowing opponents to find his backhand too often. It is only since he started working with Stefan Edberg that he has really made the most of his abilities by rushing the net more often.

"You go back through the history of the game and the best volleyers - whether you're talking about Edberg himself or Boris Becker or Sampras - have always had single-handed backhands. It's easier to manoeuvre the strings into position for the shot when you can use your non-dominant hand on the throat of the racket. That's one advantage that Roger has over the crowd, so he might as well use it."

After a grim 2013, by Federer's own stratospheric standards, everything has come together this season. He is undoubtedly the form horse going into the US Open, after winning in Cincinnati last week and reaching the final of both his previous tournaments: the Rogers Cup in Toronto and Wimbledon.

So, to return to the original debate, we can probably agree that Nadal at his best would beat a fit and firing Federer on the majority of surfaces. Even on grass, judging by the epoch-defining Wimbledon final of 2008. But could Nadal ever be as great, for as long, as Federer has been? Not a chance. And so to the follow-up question. Which is more important: the highest point of your most daring climb, or the length of time you spend in the mountains? To that one, there is no obvious answer.

The Telegraph, London

2 comments so far

This article brings up excellent points but doesn't understand the head-to-head rivalry aspect. One player, simply due to style, can have the total wood on another player.

In Grand Slams, Federer has been mainly defeated by one player: Nadal. The main question then is this: if Nadal himself has only been beaten by Federer in two grand slams in his career, where are all the other Grand Slams titles he should have won? The fact is that he has been beaten by more players, and often earlier in Grand Slams, than Federer. By a long way. And other than the French, Rafa has never defended a Grand Slam title.

He might have the wood on him head-to-head but Rafa has a way to go to be historically equal to Federer.

Commenter

Crawford

Date and time

August 20, 2014, 1:27PM

Pro tennis exerts an enormous amount of strain on the body, especially with today's more baseline-dominant and physical style of play. Federer is an anomaly, wherein his balletic smoothness will most likely allow him to play into his late-30s. Regardless of the head-to-head record vs. Nadal, Federer is the most complete and consistent player I've ever seen; no one will likely come close to making 23-straight Grand Slam semi-finals again. As great of a champion that Nadal is, Federer to me will still be above him when it's all said and done.